


Interlude in London

by Empy (Empyreus)



Category: American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Genre: Airports, Books, Bookstores, Coffee Shops, Dreams, F/M, Gods, Hotels, Introspection, London, Loneliness, M/M, Melancholy, Memories, Nightmares, Post-Canon, Sleep, Sleep Deprivation, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-22
Updated: 2005-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:01:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1628117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Empyreus/pseuds/Empy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shadow has kept on walking. <br/>(Set just after the book.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interlude in London

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sweetestdrain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetestdrain/gifts).
  * Translation into Русский available: [Лондонская интерлюдия](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5020450) by [sige_vic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sige_vic/pseuds/sige_vic)



> Written for sweetestdrain.

Shadow never had much interest in books. Not since one failed to shield him from his mother's death.

As he stood framed by wide and high bookcases, he wondered why he had walked into a bookstore. Perhaps he was trying, in some backward and strange way, to double back on his life. Closure or something of the sort. It didn't seem to be working, and he wandered restless between the shelves, drawing his fingertips over the cracked and broken spines of used books. He idly wondered if they had been brought here because they, too, had failed to shield someone from death. There was _Gravity's Rainbow_ , the edition the same that killed reading for him, and his heart did an unpleasant little double-beat. When he had read it the first and only time, he had wanted to see London for himself. Now he was there, but it was a lifetime too late.

He stopped his hand from wandering on over the book-spines, then hooked his finger to draw out a slim volume. He regretted it instantly, and was about to put the book back when it fell open in his hand, fluttering pages only enough for him to see a line of words. Grabbing the lower edge of the book in his hands, Shadow saw loose pages slide forward, and he cradled the book to his chest and caught one of the loose pages before it fell.

_i like my body when it is with your  
body. It is so quite a new thing.  
Muscles better and nerves more.  
i like your body. i like what it does,  
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine  
of your body and its bones, and the trembling  
-firm-smooth ness and which i will  
again and again and again  
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,  
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz  
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes  
over parting flesh...And eyes big love-crumbs,_

_and possibly i like the thrill  
of under me you quite so new._

He looked at the poem, the words stark and black against the cheap and acidic paper that had come unglued from the spine. He thought about his lovers, the line that really was neither long nor short, just a group of people, a line of usual suspects. Laura was dressed in her favourite jeans, the ones that were flannel-soft under his hands as he struggled with the snaps. He could see her nipples through the honeysuckle yellow shirt she wore.

He would never feel her body under his again.

Low Key, or Loki as he was really called, not that the name mattered when you pronounced it, looked straight at him from the memory. His hair was a little longer than it was in prison, and he had a little strange cowlick over his left eyebrow. Shadow couldn't quite remember what clothes Low Key wore. There was a strange dimness over the memory there, like it was being erased slowly. He could still see the scars on Low Key's face, and he realized with a jolt that what he had thought was a burgundy shirt was a dress shirt soaked in the black-red blood of the dead. He dimly remembered that black blood indicated a lacerated liver and his free hand gripped around an invisible spear. _I consecrate this battle to me._

He would never feel Low Key's sharp-boned body against his again.

He saw other people and half-remembered their names. He remembered adolescent elbows and hip-bones and nervous sweat that was slick under clammy hands, but the names stayed hidden.

He would never feel them either.

 

The bookstore smelled of dust and dead books as Shadow leaned his head against the shelves.

 _Under me you quite so new_. Laura used to have her mouth open when they made love, and she breathed little-robin-redbreast breaths, her chest twitching with the rhythm, and he never really learned that rhythm, never. He was always out of sync, and he remembered the terrible spike-surge of jealousy he felt when he realized Low Key and Laura must have stuttered and gasped as one when their broken bodies were run through by the spear.

"Bitch," he breathed, intending the insult for Low Key, not Laura. He had never been able to call her anything abrasive, not even when he had found out what she had done and how she had died the first time.

"Pardon?" a polite and cultivated voice asked next to his ear. Shadow looked out of the corner of his eye at the speaker: a man in his forties, by the looks of it, who was peering at him with kind blue eyes.

"Nothing," Shadow hastened to say, straightening up and giving a little shake of his head before looking at the man again. "How much?" he asked as he shut the book he was holding with a little snap, trapping the loose page. "For the book?" he went on, feeling suddenly unnerved by the silent but kind scrutiny he seemed to be under.

The man across from him reached over, tilting the book toward the light with a well-manicured hand. "The binding is in such a state." He clucked his tongue, then passed his thumb over the spine. Shadow had no time to shift his own grip, and the momentary skin-on-skin contact prickled on his skin in a way it certainly shouldn't have done. He'd felt that sort of touch before, when he walked with gods, and he stared at the bookseller. The man looked back at him, gaze calm and level, a little smile playing around the corners of his mouth. "Was there something else?" he asked, pushing the book back against Shadow's chest.

"Uh," Shadow said, the single syllable the only thing he could say then. "No. Thank you."

"Best be on your way, then," the bookseller said. His voice had a strange authority. "There's going to be rain, I suspect."

Later, Shadow would realize he did not pay for the book, but he considered it in line with what became of it. He left it, unread, in the anonymous room he slept in for three nights before setting out again.

 

As Shadow stepped out of the bookstore, he almost collided with a young man who was on his way in. He wore sunglasses even though the day was grey and darkening steadily as the rain clouds covered the sky. Shadow muttered an apology as they both occupied the doorframe for a shared second, then the young man twisted past him.

There was an old car parked in front of the bookstore, and Shadow looked at his reflection in the windshield as he walked past. He looked no older, really, which was rather remarkable considering what he had been through. Then a drop of rain spattered on the black bonnet of the car, presaging a downpour, and Shadow tightened his hold on the book and headed toward the warm yellow glow of a nearby cafe.

The scent of bread made his stomach ache, and he noted with a strange sense of detachment that he hadn't eaten in ages. There had been that one flat and plastic-tasting roll he had eaten at the airport, but that had been in the wee hours of the morning, when the few passengers trudging around the airport were hollow-eyed and jet-lagged. He had sat across from a girl in rumpled clothing who had settled to sleep on the hard plastic seats in the cavernous departure hall. She had curled her neck like a cat might and a slight smile had played on her lips. Laura had smiled when she slept, too, and it had made him want to reach over to wake her and ask what she found so funny.

The airports, Schiphol, Charles de Gaulle, Heathrow, Hellinikon and so many others, were like incarnation after incarnation of limbo, with people milling back and forth on their way back home or away from home. Shadow had felt envious.

He had lost count of how many airports he had sat in, how many cities he had circled once and then left. When he had last seen Odin on Iceland, he had decided to uproot himself and keep travelling. He had done that, all right, travelled until he was sure he was spinning backward over time zones, trekking back-first into night only to emerge in the evening.

He stood looking at his reflection in the curved glass of the cafe's glass display case until the girl behind the counter coughed nervously. Shadow started at the sound, then composed himself and ordered tea and an over-priced sandwich.

"Watch your mouth, love," the girl behind the counter said as she pushed the cup toward Shadow. There was a strange trill in her voice. "It's hot as hellfire."

Shadow gave her a wan smile, thinking that he had seen more of hell than most of the people in the cafe could imagine. He sat with his back to the counter and the rest of the patrons and looked out at the rain-wet street.

An hour later, he thought he saw Laura in the crowd milling past the window of the cafe, because he knew the soft glitter of her hair. It wasn't her, just as the tall old man walking two large wolfhounds hadn't been Wednesday.

 

Rain was still falling when the cafe closed, and Shadow realized he had sat there staring at nothing in particular while his tea cooled in front of him. He half ran, half walked through empty streets to his hotel, a tall and ungainly building near a tube station.

The woman at the reception desk didn't look up as he walked past. Her thin fingers danced over the keyboard as she typed, and Shadow was reminded of Zorya Vechernyaya. The woman's hands were old and wrinkled, though her face was smooth. Old and new, Shadow thought, thinking of digital gods fusing with old gods.

 

The elevator was old and slow and smelled faintly of ozone, and Shadow wished he had taken the stairs. When he got to his room, he drew the curtains shut, sneezing once as dust danced down along the folds of the heavy fabric. He lay flat out on his back on the creaking bed and listened to the people on the other side of the thin wall. Eventually, they fell silent and Shadow fell asleep.

 

He woke up a few hours later with a blinding headache even though he hadn't had anything stronger than tea. It was like no headache he had ever had, and it gnawed at the inside of his skull as he leaned heavily on the sink in the small bathroom. He felt sick and alone and more like a child than he had in a very long time.

He didn't want to sleep, because sleep only brought him dreams full of gods old and new, and of blood running down his sides to pool on the black earth underneath him. He dreamed of Laura, a skeleton with sinews made of maggots instead of flesh, and he dreamed of Low Key fettered and screaming. The dreams were fading slowly, shortening and paling, but he still couldn't handle them, and he sat on the edge of the bathtub coated in cold sweat and with the hot taste of bile in his mouth.

He had been spending his days travelling and wandering, sleeping only briefly to make sure he wouldn't dream. It didn't help for long. When his sleep was dreamless, he dreamed while awake. How many times had he seen Laura? How many times had he heard her voice say "Puppy" though there was no sound?

Odin, the man who was and was not Wednesday, showed up in his dreams from time to time, always silent, always looking at him with that steely gaze that was half glass. Shadow couldn't bring himself to call the man Father, but he knew it was true and it scared him. What was a son of a god if he couldn't even handle dreaming? He laughed at himself, a short and cracked laugh. He had hung on a tree for nine days, walked in the underworld and fought gods, and here he was, scared of dreaming.

He stood up, wincing at the feel of the cold floor-tiles under his bare feet, and walked back to the bed. He settled to lie on his side with his eyes closed. He still couldn't sleep, and he could hear the dull rumble and swish of traffic through the window. It sounded like the wind rushing past his ears as he sat on the back of the thunderbird, and that memory finally drew him down into sleep. He did not dream, and when he woke again, he still felt endlessly and bone-hollowingly alone.

[End]

**Author's Note:**

> _NB: the poem at the beginning is by e.e. cummings. I do not own it, just as I do not own any of the characters._


End file.
